BANGALORE, INDIA: A mix of natural disasters, political upheaval and financial crisis in 2011 has prompted companies to plan for 2012 against a backdrop of economic turmoil and great uncertainty.

However, in certain areas of business, there are still some absolute certainties. One such area is that of data storage and storage infrastructure, for which demand will undoubtedly intensify in the year ahead, continuing the trend in recent years of exponential growth.

The challenge for IT professionals is to tackle these pressures with limited budgets, dictated by the global financial crisis, that make acquisition and rollout of new infrastructure difficult. Besides careful budget management, they need to accurately gauge the real impact of the systems in place, such as cloud technology, in order to build on it effectively.

Such evaluation is particularly difficult amid the distortions caused by the economic crisis. To offer some guidance, Hu Yoshida, Chief Technology Officer of Hitachi Data Systems recently announced his top ten storage trends for 2012:

1. Storage efficiency: Global economic uncertainty will require IT professionals to achieve better returns from their existing assets rather than buying new assets. There will be a greater focus on storage efficiency technologies such as storage virtualization, dynamic or thin provisioning, dynamic tiering, and archiving.

2. Consolidation to convergence: Consolidation will give way to convergence. Over the past few years IT has focused on consolidation and much of the low-hanging fruit has now been consolidated. In order to gain further cost savings, the focus will be on convergence of server, storage, networks, and applications.

Application programming interfaces (APIs), which offload workload to storage, can make the servers and memory more efficient. Orchestration software will help to converge the management and automate the provisioning, and reporting across local, remote, and cloud based server, storage, and network infrastructures.

3. Transparency: Applications and infrastructure will be more transparent with each other in order to facilitate convergence through open interfaces like APIs, client/providers, and plugins. Hitachi Data Systems provides Hitachi Command Director software, which gives applications a view into the service level, utilization, and health of the storage infrastructure behind the virtual storage that they are using.